Our twenty-fifth issue of the Architects’ Newsletter focuses on the topic of technical leadership and teamwork. We believe these topics are vitally important, and in our latest Architecture and Design InfoQ Trends report we’ve placed “architect as technical leader” in the early adopter phase. Therefore, understanding all the emerging leadership patterns, antipatterns, and techniques is essential for a modern software architect.

News

Randy Shoup on Creating High-Performance Cultures

Shane Hastie, Lead Editor for “Culture & Methods,” spoke to Randy Shoup, VP of Engineering at WeWork, in an InfoQ podcast recorded at QCon London 2019, about what is needed to create a high-performance culture.

Organizations with generative cultures based on trust and learning consistently perform better than bureaucratic cultures based on rules and standards. The worst performers are characterized by pathological cultures based on fear and threat.

At QCon New York, Shoup presented a related talk, "High Performance Remote and Distributed Teams” [PDF link to slides]. Additional related talk summaries from the event can be found in this article: “Key Takeaway Points and Lessons Learned from QCon New York 2019”.

The Challenges in Integrating Cross-Boundary Teams

In a recent InfoQ article, Premjith Purushotham discussed that although cross-boundary teams bring together people from diverse disciplines, backgrounds, countries, cultures, and languages to achieve a common goal, they often do not achieve the expected results, because they are not able to integrate effectively.

It is important in cross-boundary teams to overcome knowledge barriers through syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic channels. There are additional contextual factors around an organization, such as environment, task, time, and leadership which impact team effectiveness. Also, team mental models and transactive memory are factors in building a cross-functional team.

An Engineer’s Guide to a Good Night’s Sleep

Speaking to Shane Hastie, The Financial Times’ Sarah Wells noted, “It is a big change for most developers to be operating software. And if you haven’t done it before, it is terrifying the first time you are called up at 2 in the morning and you have to fix something. It is up to you as an organization to turn that into something where people feel supported. Mostly the way we do that is we have tended to swarm on problems”.

In “An Engineer’s Guide to a Good Night’s Sleep”, Nicky Wrightson, principal engineer at Skyscanner, explores the same topic and asserts that leaders should build teams that understand what being on call means. If a team owns the system, they also own all the aspects of supporting it.

Engineers must deeply understanding the customers’ needs, so they can react to failure quickly. Teams should not wait until a catastrophic failure to test their responses—they should put processes and approaches in place, which they can use to test every aspect of support.

Empathy is a Technical Skill

Andrea Goulet maintains that empathy is more than a feeling; it’s a skill that can be learned and applied. Lack of empathy while coding can lead to the creation of legacy systems that are difficult to work with. Leaving communication artifacts throughout a codebase can help other people understand ideas, rationale, and constraints. Empathy can help an engineer identify human bias and assumptions that get built into software systems.

Balancing Generalists and Specialists: Building Successful Agile Teams

In a recent InfoQ article, Dave West argued there is a false belief in traditional project management approaches, that it is possible to plan all of the work up front, determine who should be involved, and what skills are needed. Scrum accepts the reality of not knowing, with the idea that teams can plan enough to get started in terms of the work and team composition.

West asserts that there is no magic system for building teams. By focusing on a team of highly motivated generalists who can beg or borrow the knowledge to get the value delivered, a leader can inspect and adapt that team, the work, how they work, and the skills needed when they realize something is missing.

Dashboards and Culture: How Openness Changes Your Behavior

In a talk from Agile Tour London, Steve Poole, DevOps practitioner at IBM, showed how to design status and trend dashboards that will make a team more effective without overloading them. The talk also included case studies with various types of teams, and demonstrates that correct cultivation of dashboards (and associated culture) can lead to increased openness, ownership, and productivity.

Case Study

Q&A on the Book Virtual Leadership

In a recent InfoQ Q&A, Penny Pullan sat down with Ben Linders and discussed key ideas from her recent book Virtual Leadership, and proposed that many virtual teams are run poorly. It is possible to develop an individual’s virtual leadership and become skilled at virtual meetings, engage remote team members, and do great work together.

Pullan asserts that teams should use virtual methods when at least one person is remote, even if most of the other people are co-located. Establish group norms and communications, taking everyone’s preferences into account. In a related article on InfoQ Judy Rees discusses “Mastering Remote Meetings: How To Get—and Keep—Your Participants Engaged”, and argues that the central challenge of designing and running remote meetings is to get and keep people actively engaged.

It is important not to aim for command-and-control as a leadership style—it tends to backfire when used remotely. Instead, be a facilitative leader, helping team members to collaborate and each person to do the best job they can.

Trust is key. Leaders should focus on developing trust throughout the team, and encourage people to get to know each other. Leaders themselves should act in a manner that is credible, reliable, authentic, and fair.

Pullan states that teams should choose an appropriate mix of tools to support the requirements for meeting up and sharing documents and discussions. Where possible, during live meetings, use video and shared screens (with drawing/annotation), plus other engagement strategies.

This is an excerpt of a full article on InfoQ: “Q&A on the Book Virtual Leadership”.

InfoQ is running a series of articles on effective remote meetings. Supporting the series will be a free online meeting taking place on October 1st. This interactive learning session will help you learn proven practices for leading remote teams and running effective meetings. Learn more and register on Eventbrite.

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Missed a newsletter? You can find all of the previous issues on InfoQ.

This edition of The Software Architects' Newsletter is brought to you by:

Eliminating Microservices Complexity and Tool Sprawl

Microservices-based architectures are giving enterprises the agility and scalability to deliver customer experiences championed in the digital economy, but the resulting tool sprawl and complexities are driving an urgent need to consolidate and simplify.

As organisations begin to run into these challenges, the tendency can be to patch over the issues by deploying lots of point tools that solve different parts of the problem, resulting in tool sprawl, growing fragility and even more complexity. A great deal of expertise and interdependencies are required for just the operational environment, let alone the application itself.

InfoQ strives to facilitate the spread of knowledge and innovation within this space, and in this newsletter we aim to curate and summarise key learnings from news items, articles and presentations created by industry peers, both on InfoQ and across the web. We aim to keep readers informed and educated about emerging trends, peer-validated early adoption of technologies, and architectural best practices, and are always keen to receive feedback from our readers. We hope you find it useful, but if not you can unsubscribe using the link below.

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